Monday, 11 January 2016

With the news this
morning that he died
at the age of 69, today is a difficult day to be a David Bowie fan. Like many of us, I
grew up in a world where Bowie was just always there. He was
like the weather: sometimes he’d be cheerful, sometimes he’d be moody,
sometimes he’d be absolutely horrific (that cover of 'God
Only Knows' on Tonight, Jesus Christ…) but his actual
existence was a constant.

It was a constant for me since I was old enough to talk. I’m heterochromic – my eyes are two different
colours – and long before I ever heard any of Bowie’s music, long before I
listened to one of his albums (for the record: Outsidewas my first), one
of the first things adults would say to me when they noticed was ‘Oh, you know
who else has different coloured eyes?’

Except, of course, as any Bowie fan knows, he doesn’t. Bowie
suffered a head injury as a young man which left him with one pupil larger than
the other, which makes it look like he has different coloured
eyes, but he doesn’t.

Bowie: NOT HETEROCHROMIC

Didn’t.

I’m still adjusting to writing about him in the past tense.

But my grief, as a fan, as a queer person hugely influenced by Bowie,
isn’t the only thing which makes today difficult. It’s become a cliché to say
that all our faves are problematic, but the thing that complicates my grief for
Bowie is the fact that, back in the 1970s, at the height of his fame, Bowie
had sex with a thirteen-year-old girl.

That girl was Lori Mattix, a groupie who, before more famously becoming
involved with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, lost her virginity to
Bowie. It’s clear from interviews with Mattix that she doesn’t regard this as
rape or assault, and considers herself to have consented to Bowie doing his
thing with her, but it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, and it’s a fact
which many people, quite rightly, find distasteful. And we should. Older men
having sex with teenage girls is abusive and exploitative because of the power
dynamic involved. A thirteen-year-old can’t really give their informed consent
to something like that, and people should know better than to exploit a young
girl’s hero-worship just to get their jollies. It’s hard to think of a
contemporary artist with the same stature as Bowie, but if any current celebrity were
discovered to have been doing that there would, rightly, be an outcry.

That’s because the mechanism exists, today, to hold celebrities
accountable. Right-wingers might decry tumblr activism, but social networking
and the ubiquity of mobile recording devices has fundamentally shifted the
balance of power between stars and fans. When we say that there will never
again be a star like Bowie, this is part of what we mean.

Bowie, and Page, and all the other rock stars of that era, rose to fame
at a very different time. Rape culture saturates our world even now, and
the rock culture of the 70s was rotten with it. Young men like
Bowie and Page were treated like God-Emperors, decadent overlords who could do
what they wanted with whom they wanted, and who were protected by an entire
apparatus of managers, minders and money-men who could make all their problems
go away. A million eyes looked on them with lust and wonder, they were told
they could take what they liked, and they did. And many, many young people,
especially young women, were hurt as a result.

As a survivor
of rape and sexual assault myself, it’s hard for me to listen to
Bowie’s music knowing what he did. It's hard to listen to a lot of music from that era for the same reason. But I still listen to Bowie, because years before I found
out, those songs gave me the strength as a queer person to stand out, to be who
I needed to be. I still listen to them because they’re an amazing example of
what happens when an artistic mind with a pop sensibility is given full
creative freedom. I just wish Bowie, and the stars of his era, hadn’t been
given so much freedom in the areas where they should have been restrained.

Bowie’s entire career constituted a critique of rock and roll, of fame,
of stardom, and – as distasteful as an argument is at a funeral – maybe it’s
appropriate, in that sense, that we are having this
conversation today. Bowie was a superstar who seemed to be something more than
human, something alien, something divine, and he played with that perception of
himself as a messianic figure for much of his career, in public – and took
advantage of it backstage. When you treat men like gods, when you give
them carte blanche with no oversight, and no accountability,
you enable their abuse of power. There will never be a star with Bowie’s level
of fame again, and we should be thankful such a thing’s no longer possible. The
final lesson we can take from David Bowie is that never again should we treat a
star like David Bowie.

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About AJ

AJ McKenna is a spoken word artist, but hopes to provoke you to disagree with her about that. Her poetry film 'A Letter to a Minnesota Prison' (commissioned by Apples & Snakes and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation)was shown at the South Bank Centre in 2013. In 2015 she premiered her one-woman show 'Howl of the Bantee' at the PBH Free Fringe in Edinburgh. A former Deputy Editor at So So Gay magazine, she now writes for Vada and Clarissa Explains Fuck All.